Data models define a collection of components and potentially also the interrelationships between those components. The components may be any definable entity, and the relationship between the components may be any definable relationship. Data models are not limited to defining software components such as objects in an object-oriented program. Components in the data model may also be representations of people (in the case of, for example, an organizational hierarchy data model), steps or flows (in the case of a process data model), cash credits or debits (in the case of a balance sheet data model), and so forth for a potentially unlimited variety of data models. The nature of the components will often depend on the nature of the data model itself.
The various components of a data model may have various associated attributes. Furthermore, each component might have various relationship types with other components of the data model. In order to gain a reasonable intuition on a particular data model, it is helpful to have a particular visual representation (or view) of the data model. However, some views may emphasize particular attributes, and perhaps particular relationship types, but may unintentionally deemphasize other attributes and relationship types.
When a developer designs a computer-implemented view of a data model, the developer may program software that illustrates what is applied to a particular data model to show a particular view of the particular data model. However, to do that, the developer might go through detailed coding processes and labor associated with developing that computer-implemented view. Alternatively or in addition, the view may be limited to only one particular view of the data, and have limited configurability.